The Story Behind ‘One Holy Night’ by J.M. Hochstetler

One Holy Night started out as a short story back in the late 1980s. I was working with another author to develop a book of short stories that revolved around Christmas, each with a different theme, and all within a larger story that tied them together. I was assigned to write a miracle story, and what greater miracle is there than the birth of Jesus? After we each wrote several stories, however, the project was shelved and never completed. But although I forgot about the story, a seed had been planted.

Over the years I’ve done a lot of thinking about the gritty issues that impact our lives—intergenerational and interracial conflict, addictions, war, illness, death, divorce. Brokenness of one kind or another affects every family and individual. And the more I thought about it, the more I questioned how we can make sense of our lives and find reconciliation in our relationships. How can we find purpose, strength, and healing when we go through painful experiences?

I continued to think about these issues, and when the Gulf War came along in the mid 1990s, it shaped my thinking some more. Around 1999 or 2000, I was looking for a new project, so I got this story back out, reset it during the Vietnam War, and played around with it off and on. Then 9-11 happened, and right around that time a young woman in our church was diagnosed with intestinal cancer and died within a year. In the fall of 2002 my parents both died as the result of a car accident. Afterward the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were in all the headlines, and opposition was growing along with the casualty count. Commentators began to compare the war in Iraq with the quagmire of Vietnam—a conflict I was well acquainted with since I was in high school and college during those years.

So all these things started to find their way into this story set during 1967 about a family in a small town in Minnesota that is faced with these issues while the son is away, serving in Vietnam. The conclusion I came up with is pretty well summed up in the little blurb for the book: As on that holy night so long ago . . . in a world torn by sin and strife . . . to a family that has suffered heart-wrenching loss . . . there will be born a baby . . .

For a long time I didn’t think this story would ever be published and find its way to readers, but the Lord hadn’t forgotten it. One Holy Night was published in April 2008 and won the Christian Small Publishers Book of the Year in 2009. It continues to touch readers’ hearts and to receive excellent reviews, all to God’s glory.

J. M. Hochstetler writes stories that always involve some element of the past and of finding home. Born in central Indiana, the daughter of Mennonite farmers, she graduated from Indiana University with a degree in Germanic languages. She was an editor with Abingdon Press for twelve years and has published four novels. Daughter of Liberty (2004), Native Son (2005), and Wind of the Spirit (March 2009), the first three books of the critically acclaimed American Patriot Series, are set during the American Revolution. One Holy Night, a retelling of the Christmas story set in modern times, is the 2009 Christian Small Publishers Fiction Book of the Year and a finalist for the 2009 American Christian Fiction Writers Long Contemporary Book of the Year.

Hochstetler is a member of American Christian Fiction Writers, Advanced Writers and Speakers Association, Christian Authors Network, Middle Tennessee Christian Writers, Nashville Christian Writers Association, and Historical Novels Society. She and her husband live near Nashville, Tennessee.

You can find Joan online at www.jmhochstetler.com or at this book’s blog http://oneholynight.blogspot.com.

The Story Behind ‘Shakespeare Ashes’ by Chris DeBrie

Ever since I was a child, I’ve been a what if kind of person. Not necessarily in a constructive way. It is usually just to amuse myself. I’ve written down a lot of those fantasies, and they became stories. At first, that was all my stories contained: A bunch of action and emotional dialogue, with little sense of character. Fun stuff.

At some point in my twenties, that changed. Growth as a person parallels growth as a writer. Once I started seeing others as complete people, my writing got a little deeper. Every person I see, I get a flash of what s/he would be like as a character of mine, of what backstory I’d create.  Doing that used to keep me from actually relating to people–I’d be off in my own world, dreaming with my eyes open. I learned to compartamentalize. By now, I can take a snapshot of my surroundings, and revisit it once I’m at the laptop.

All writers are mixed and folded into their work.

Shakespeare Ashes is a load of those snapshots, collected and unfiltered. I originally wrote the story in third-person, and from one character’s point of view. But this character had friends who were just as interesting. They wouldn’t shut up, so to speak. So I kept writing the things I heard them say. One day, I wrote a chapter in first person, “just because”, and I realized the story was meant for that format. I rewrote the book. It took almost a year.

There are more characters to imagine. More what ifs. And it all started with my illustrated book from the second grade, with wallpaper for a book cover and a crayon drawing pasted on front. The title was, “Forkhead”, about a boy with fork-shaped ridges in his head. Forkhead and his best friend play some pranks around school. They trade some schoolyard snaps. Then they somehow become astronauts and camp on the moon in sleeping bags, with no space suits. i remember they stayed on the moon for 999 days, and the story ended there, so my guess is, they must have gone insane…

Chris DeBrie was born in North Carolina, creating comics and stories as soon as he could hold a pencil. He wrote the millennial love story As Is as a ninth grader, publishing it a decade later. Selective Focus was the result of those homemade comic screenplays. With Shakespeare Ashes, he pulls the reader into the raw thoughts of four very different characters. DeBrie is a fan of photography, learning languages, and clean water. He lives in Virginia.

http://www.washyourhandsproductions.com/

The Story Behind ‘For the Love of St. Nick’ by Garasamo Maccagnone

Over the years, I listened carefully to many of my wife’s stories. Her father was Commander Blake Field, a naval academy standout and veteran of the Korean, Vietnam, and Persian Gulf wars. I obviously patterned the commander in my story after him.

Prior to her parents’ divorce, my wife lived the typical military lifestyle, with the family moving every couple of years to far off lands. Often, her father went on secret cold war missions and I recalled listening to my wife tell me how frightened she was as a girl that her father would never return. That of course, sparked my interest and was the sentiment I built off of years later when I decided to write this story.

The other major incident, which inspired me a great deal, happened while I worked at a hospital in my early thirties. One morning after my shift was over, a priest I knew at the hospital divulged that a young mother died during childbirth the previous night. He used the term placenta previa and went on to explain what had happened and why he was told the woman passed on.

Together, somehow, over a fifteen- to twenty-year period these stories found their way to the forefront of my mind, and served as the mechanisms that launched my tale. From there, I simply needed to create the right setting and to apply my craft.

 

Garasamo Maccagnone studied creative writing and literature under noted American writers Sam Astrachan and Stuart Dybek at Wayne State University and Western Michigan University. A college baseball player as well, Maccagnone met his wife Vicki as a junior at WMU. The following year, after injuring his throwing arm, Maccagnone left school and his baseball ambitions to marry Vicki. After a two year stint at both W.B. Doner and BBDO advertising agencies, Maccagnone left the industry to apply his knowledge of marketing in a new venture in an up-and-coming industry. Maccagnone created a company called, “Crate and Fly,” and turned it from a store front in 1984 to a world-wide multi-million dollar shipping corporation by 1994.  

In the mid 90’s Maccagnone decided to fulfill the promise of his writing career, by first penning the children’s book, The Suburban Dragon and then following up with a collection of short stories and poetry entitled, The Affliction of Dreams. His literary novel, St. John of the Midfield was published in 2007, followed by his For the Love of St. Nick, which was released in 2008.  Maccagnone expanded the original version of For the Love of St. Nick and had the book illustrated for a new release in June 2009. 

Garasamo “Gary” Maccagnone lives today in Shelby Township, Michigan, with his wife Vicki and three children. You can visit Gary online at www.garasamomaccagnone.com.

Sylvia Engdahl and the Story Behind ‘Stewards of the Flame’

I had two inspirations for Stewards of the Flame, which brought two subjects that most people would consider quite separate together in an unusual way.  The first was my wish to express my dismay over today’s attitudes toward health care, and the second was a desire to explore the ideas about so-called paranormal powers of the human mind that I had dealt with in my previous novels.

All my life I’ve been outraged by our society’s paternalistic promotion of what “authorities” believe is best for everyone’s health, based on statistics without regard to individual differences or freedom of choice. The increasing involvement of government in this area — not merely in control of medical care but in tax-support propaganda — is a trend I find deeply troubling.

As one of the characters in Stewards of Flame says, “Whenever health authorities succeed in overcoming some actual problem, such as contagion, they are left with a bureaucracy that must justify its existence by medicalizing more and more aspects of simply being human. Where it’s combined with the natural tendency of government to encroach on personal liberty, that process has been unrestrained.”

And so, for the story, I created a space colony where this trend has been carried to its ultimate logical conclusion: the government and the medical authorities are one and the same.  All crime is viewed as illness and all illness is considered crime; the Hospital Administrator is the chief executive and there are no police except the ambulance officers.  Medical treatment is compulsory and everything thought to be bad for health is illegal.  It’s not really very far-fetched when you consider that medical considerations would be given top priority anyway in establishing a colony on another world — although the story includes one element that carries the idea to reductio ad absurdum lengths.

Such a government would obviously be oppressive, yet to have made it corrupt would have ruined the point of the story, which is that the people of that world democratically voted away their freedom.  So, since the regime is supported by the public, the dissidents who are my protagonists aren’t trying to overthrow it and they know they have no chance of persuading the majority to reject it.  That, I’m afraid, is all too realistic.  I don’t see any way out myself, except for humankind to mature beyond reliance on the current concept of health care to a level at which people control their own health — and do other things — through mind powers that  are now considered “paranormal.”  This could not happen today, which is why the story had to be set in the distant future.

Anything set on another planet in the distant future is, by definition, science fiction.  This was a problem, because my fiction has always appealed more to general audiences than to readers with a lot of science fiction background; though many sci-fi fans enjoy it, it’s neither action/adventure fiction nor “far out” enough for the taste of the majority.  I was able to get my earlier novels published (and later republished) by major publishers because they were Young Adult novels, and from the marketing standpoint that field is entirely separate from genre fiction.

I knew that my adult novels could be mass-marketed only as genre fiction and would therefore, despite my reputation in the YA field, be unpublishable in today’s market.  Being used to acceptance by traditional publishers, it took me awhile to accept the idea of writing a novel I knew I would have to self-publish.  But the story took over, and since I am not young enough for there to be a chance of the market changing in my lifetime, I went ahead with it.  Since I have the desktop-publishing and editing skills needed to produce the book myself, I did not have to pay for its publication, which I’d have been unwilling to do.

However, though the book has had excellent reviews and won a bronze medal in the Visionary Fiction category of the 2008 Independent Publisher (IPPY) Book Awards, it is hard to promote because the reviews usually get posted in the “science fiction” section of websites, where the readers most apt to like it aren’t looking.  So I am trying to reach those readers through blogs that mainstream readers visit.  If you’re not a science fiction fan, don’t let that label put you off!

***

Sylvia Engdahl is best known as the author of highly-acclaimed Young Adult science fiction novels, one of which was a Newbery Honor book and a finalist for the 2002 Book Sense Book of the Year in the Rediscovery category. However, her trilogy Children of the Star, originally written for teens, was republished as adult SF, and she is now writing fiction only for adults.

Engdahl is a strong advocate of space colonization and has maintained a widely-read space section of her website for many years. She lives in Eugene, Oregon, and currently works as a freelance editor of nonfiction anthologies.

More information about Stewards of the Flame, the topics with which it deals, and its newly-released sequel can be found at www.stewardsoftheflame.com. Her main website is at www.sylviaengdahl.com.

The Story Behind Family Plots by Mary Patrick Kavanaugh

I have to have a funeral, I thought, walking in my neighborhood cemetery on a hot July afternoon last year.

Not for a dead person, mind you, but for a dead dream. Mine.

Earlier that month I’d received a strained call from my literary agent. My first novel, Family Plots: Love, Death, and Tax Evasion, had just been rejected for the sixteenth time.

Given that some wildly successful authors have been rejected many more times than that, I didn’t think it cause for alarm. But my agent informed me that the publishing industry—like many professions—was in financial crisis, and she didn’t think a first-time author with no sales history had much of a chance in this climate. “You should try some of the small presses,” she said, “or even self-publish.”

Self-publish? After all the time, money, work, visioning and prayer I’d put into this?

NO WAY.

That wasn’t part of the plan.

After I became a widow at age 38, something told me I’d better get to work on my life-long dream of publishing a novel before my own stint on earth was up—and as luck would have it, my dearly departed husband had left me with a juicy tale to tell. He was a criminal attorney who, it turned out, was committing a few crimes of his own. In an attempt to find romance, family, and financial stability, I’d stumbled into a world of pseudonyms, fake weddings, and hidden bank accounts. Events that landed my beloved into the family cemetery plot, also revealed unexpected secrets and stashes that transformed a seeming tragedy into one of surprising healing and redemption. It was a great plotline, but I still needed to write it down.

This is not one of those stories where the author gets an idea, God dictates it to her in thirteen days, and then, while flying to Kalamazoo, she fortuitously meets a famous agent who promises to sell the book. No. Labor and delivery of this baby was harder and possibly more expensive than the one I raised and sent off to college.

With love, support, and regular spiritual mind treatments from countless Religious Science practitioners, I harnessed the inspiration and discipline necessary to get to work. I wrote four versions of the manuscript over four years. After that, I hired three professional editors to help me cut, trim, revise, and re-pace the book. A New York literary agent offered representation, and we celebrated my good fortune when a best-selling author went on record saying it was a page-turner.

The fact that it took seven years—the time it takes to replace every cell in the human body—to prepare the manuscript struck me as a good omen. I wasn’t even the same person as I was when I’d started, and the new me was confident that this book would find exactly what I’d prayed for: the perfect publisher.

When my agent threw in the towel, I spent countless hours cocooned in bed, feeling destroyed—like the caterpillar that dissolves into goo, having no idea if it will ever re-emerge into the light. After all that work, mentally and spiritually, it seemed impossible that I didn’t have the backing of a reputable, recognizable New York publisher to provide the marketing, PR, and distribution to bring my dream to life. What had I done wrong?

I was especially depressed that I wouldn’t get to hold a book launch party at the cemetery, where so many scenes in the novel took place. I’d had such a clear vision of the event, from the pallbearers carrying a casket filled with books, down to the tombstone brownies for dessert. Despite my hard work, prayers, and the colorful vision boards I’d hung all over the house, my dream was dead—or at least it had reached a frustrating dead end—and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it.

That’s when the miracle happened. It became clear to me: /My dream had died, but I could still have a book launch at a cemetery./ It could be a funeral, which was thematically appropriate for the book and the rejection. This was even BETTER than a mere book launch.

The clouds parted, a chorus of angels sang, and the butterfly emerged from her cocoon. How perfect! Not only would I embrace this failure—I would flaunt it. I’d have a funeral for my dead dream of landing a mainstream book contract, and use it as a publicity stunt to draw attention to my book. Guests would be invited to bring remnants of their dead dreams and dashed hopes to toss in the casket as well. What better way to acknowledge and overcome life’s disappointments than to do it in community, with music, ceremony, and a tasty snack buffet? We could all use an opportunity to take ourselves a little less seriously.

The idea immediately resurrected my spirits. I’d been praying for “the perfect publisher,” and apparently I was the one I’d been waiting for all along.

Doors opened immediately. The cemetery management loved the idea and donated the chapel, casket, and reception hall. Friends contacted the media and articles appeared in the local and national press, generating a standing-room-only crowd. A gaggle of chic, black-clad wailers filled the pews and made the appropriate scene as the pallbearers escorted the casket and me into the chapel. My beloved practitioner played the role of “the preacher,” and by the end of the service, I, as well as most of my guests, had thrown remnants of dead dreams into the coffin and were dancing in the aisles to James Brown’s /I Feel Good./ The book received great reviews on book blogs and Amazon.com, and newspapers, radio, and TV booked interviews. I even had bloggers criticizing and debating the relative merits of the event, teaching me that there’s no such thing as bad publicity.

Lest I mislead anyone, deciding to produce this spectacle was not /all/ rainbows and unicorns. I wrestled with the demonic inner voices of fear, and was worried sick that no one would come to my funeral, or that I was wasting time or pouring money down a hole.

But I ignored the naysayers, even in my own mind, and squeezed more fun out of the event than I ever thought possible. By the end of the year, I even had an offer from a new agent to pitch my next book: /Cemetery Mary’s Turning Life’s Crap Into Compost/ (CrapIntoCompost.com).

When a dream has died, how do we avoid the urge to crawl into the coffin with it?

It’s hard to believe that celebrating death could feel so uplifting, but isn’t that what we learn as students of Science of Mind? “The experience of dying is but the laying off of an old garment, and the donning of a new one,” says The Science of Mind. Many of us are able to accept this as truth—so much so that in this philosophy, the word “death” is replaced with “transition,” to help us reframe the experience.

But as we know, concepts are easier in theory than in practice. The death (or transition) of a cherished person, relationship, or dream inevitably comes packed with grief and is far more disorienting than a simple garment change. It’s more like having our skin peeled off, followed by a period of over-exposure and raw pain, and then a gradual healing. No wonder we do whatever possible to deny, ignore, or resist it.

But everyone and everything in our lives is going to die—to transition. It’s the only way to make room for new growth. Spouses, lovers, parents and children; relationships, careers, and artistic endeavors; youth, beauty, and bank accounts—no matter what visions we hold, they will ultimately die in the ebb and flow of time. And sadly, sometimes they die before their time—causing us even greater trauma, because that wasn’t part of our plan.

That’s why one of the first things I publicly tossed into the casket was my vision board. Creating vision boards, lists of desires, and measurable goals offers great tools and direction. But when our goals and visions are not out-picturing exactly the way we have dictated, I wonder if clinging to these road maps may block a path to greater possibility? Maybe there is a time when we have to let go of the dream or relationship or expectation because, let’s face it, it’s not working or making us happy.

When I finally put to rest my grandiose dreams of publishing contracts, movie options, book tours, and a guest spot on the Oprah Winfrey Show, the rush of the release was liberating and invigorating. Though the book publication didn’t turn out to be even close to the way I’d rendered it on my vision board, a comment made by a business associate who’d watched a YouTube video of the funeral best summed up the deep satisfaction I ended up feeling. “Wow,” he said. “I can’t imagine what it would be like to be so completely creatively expressed.”

If I’d had a publisher, a marketing department, and a cast of others, all with opinions, who knows how it would have played out? Even my agent, whom I told about the funeral, warned me she thought it odd, and in fact a bad idea. /Bad idea?/ Impossible given the doors that were opening and the fun I was having, I thought, suddenly relieved she was no longer my agent.

Just like our over-attachment to vision boards may limit our view of greater possibility, our egos often get in the way of our spiritual growth. And let me go on record as saying my ego was freaking out about me stepping in as publisher and producer of my own book launch. (Who did I think I was? New York didn’t take me, why should anyone else? Bury the book privately and get on with it!)

But when we select a spiritual path, we are consciously choosing expansion and growth. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of support for the ego in that process. The old ideas about who I was and what I deserved had to die too—there was no other way to make room for new growth.

Though becoming my own publisher garnered me some great attention, it has not yet catapulted me to fame, fortune, or a seat on Oprah’s couch. And while that would be nice, the beating my ego took in the process of trying to get my book published made me realize that it didn’t matter anymore. Recognizing that I had the power within to realize my vision for this project without getting outside approval from the book-publishing industry made me feel a bit like Dorothy when she learned she’d always had the power to return to Kansas.

Giving up the dream of how my book was to be published pushed me to be more courageous, creative, and resourceful than I ever knew possible.

Where my writing career will travel from here remains a mystery, and I am certainly not creating a vision board to guide it. Everything I’ve ever tried to force has become a struggle, so I now cheerfully surrender, and focus my efforts on enjoying the work.

Is this bad? Is it good? Who knows? It just is.

Watch the Trailer!

A writer since the age of eight, Mary’s award winning creative non-fiction has been published in Alligator Juniper, Room of One’s Own, San Jose Mercury News, and the San Francisco Chronicle. Her professional writing has appeared in numerous trade journals. Mary is the 2003 recipient of the nonfiction award from the Soul Making Literary Competition sponsored by the American Pen Women, and winner of a 2004 honorable mention. She was awarded writing fellowships at The David and Julia White Artist Colony, Hedgebrook: Women Authoring Change, and The Vermont Studio Center. She recently published her first book, Family Plots: Love, Death, and Tax Evasion.

View Mary’s outrageous book funeral at www.MyDreamIsDeadButImNot.com. Or read her blog at www.CrapIntoCompost.com.

Attention!  Mary (aka Cemetery Mary) is holding a funeral (December 31, 2009) and resurrection (January 2, 2010). These two events will allow others to bury dead dreams, dashed hopes, old habits and grudges in 2009 so they can come to the resurrection to begin again in 2010. Information about the live and webcast events will be posted at www.CrapIntoCompost.com, so readers are invited to sign up for the mail list.

The Story Behind Jesse’s Girl by Gary Morgenstein

Click here to pick up your copy of Jesse's Girl!

There’s nothing more difficult than being a parent. Please indulge my hubris in quoting my own words. The main character in Jesse’s Girl, Teddy Mentor, explains that we think marriage is ‘til death do us part, but that’s not true. Not when about half the marriages in America end in divorce. It’s parenting which is until death do us part. The good and the bad.

I wanted to write about being a father, in this case, a widowed father dealing with a teenage son, Jesse Mentor, gone off the rails, suffering from the awful illness of addiction. Throw in that the kid’s adopted, struggling to find his roots, plus Teddy and Jesse don’t exactly have a Ward and Beaver Cleaver relationship, and let the ride begin. Many times my heart ached for Teddy and Jesse because loving your child so badly you will do anything to help them, only to be roadblocked by their own resistance, creates an overwhelming anger, frustration and pain.

You parents know what I’m talking about. And if you’re not a parent, you’ve been a child and you understand from that window. But most novels about parenting are done from the perspective of a mother, few from the Dad. Without banging my tambourine for Male Liberation, guys hurt, too. We cry over our children and lie awake nights and get stressed. Perhaps, because of society and the way we’ve all been raised, both genders, we don’t show it or are afraid to show it. But it’s there.

As an adoptive father, I also wanted to explore the theme of adoption. The process is wonderful and we all celebrate the gift of a new child into the family. Yet what that masks is the trauma of the adoptee torn from his/her biological mother. The underlying sense of rejection lingers, sometimes maliciously so. Then comes puberty, the doubts about one’s origins inflame, may become infected, add to that the turmoil of teen years in the best of circumstances and you’re confronting a highly combustible situation.

I wanted to look at the difficulty of adoption from parent and adoptee, instead of just whisking issues under the rug. So the search of Jesse in the novel for his biological sister as he reaches for something to hold onto following the breakup of his parents’ marriage, exacerbated by the death of his mother, his descent into addiction, his fear of being 16 and confronting a dangerous world with no rules.

What’s it like when you don’t know what your own parents look like?

Fatherhood. Addiction. Adoption. Above all else, the book is about regular people. Teddy struggles to hold onto his job, 50 plus and being phased out at a PR firm. Jesse, a scared teenager with the courage to find his sister, Theresa. She in turn, looking for her own past, for love not shadowed by domestic abuse like an alien mother ship. On and on. Regular folks like all the regular folks who make up this great country, day by day, getting by, trying to do the right thing, often succeeding, but not always, and living with the consequences of both.

In addition to Jesse’s Girl, Gary Morgenstein’s most recent novels, both available exclusively on Amazon.com, are the political baseball thriller Take Me Out to the Ballgame and the romantic triangle Loving Rabbi Thalia Kleinman. His chillingly prophetic  play Ponzi Man played to sell-out crowds at a recent New York Fringe Festival. A PR consultant for Syfy Channel, he lives in Brooklyn, New York, with lots of books and rock and roll CDs. You can visit him at www.facebook.com/people/Gary-Morgenstein/1011217889 or at http://redroom.com/member/garymorg.

Meggie Remains’ Joanne Sundell “My first heroine would have to be a woman trying to make it in the rugged west.”

Meggie’s Remains, my first completed manuscript and fourth sale, is near and dear to my heart.  The title changed from Columbine Captive—for obvious reasons—to Day Dreams ~ Haunted Nights, but at the end of the day, became Meggie’s Remains.   You might ask what this means, and well you should.  Is Meggie dead, buried six feet under, never to take another breath, or is Meggie so shattered, it’s hard to take the next step in life?  Number two is closer to the truth.  My focus and interest rests solely in the nineteenth century, the Victorian Era.   For the average romance heroine, life wasn’t easy.  I can’t imagine the challenge to have lived and tried to love during such a restrictive, repressive time.  When I first thought of writing romance, I thought of Jane Eyre and its classic romantic themes, wanting to pay tribute to this quintessential romance novel.  What makes us root for Jane?  Why do we care about her, and about Edward?  How did the pair overcome impossible obstacles and find their happy ending?

Living in the West, in the Colorado Rockies, I realized the beauty all around me was a character befitting any romance novel.  My first heroine would have to be a woman trying to make it in the rugged west.  I decided to bring Jane Eyre to the American West and see what might happen if I took Jane’s situation and made it worse … and then worse.   Ever curious about how a nineteenth century heroine might have dealt with sexual trauma and upset, I wanted to peel away the pretty layers in classic romantic theme and character, and show the not-so-pretty events that can happen—the dark, complex, emotional path a heroine’s life can take, suddenly, without warning, and with no guarantee of survival.  In Meggie’s Remains, Meggie’s life mirrors Jane’s in many respects, but the mirror shatters when Meggie’s life takes a turn away from romantic conflict, toward dangers that Jane Eyre never faced.  Beyond the suspense, I wanted to capture the romance, the moment when passion ignites between heroine and hero.  Such is the stuff of which romance novels are made!

My love of old-fashioned theme and character led me to create my heroine, Meggie McMurphy, and her hero, Ethan Rourke, stumbling upon each other on the streets of Denver, Colorado Territory, October, 1874.  Their path to find true love is most definitely not an easy one.  Let’s take a closer look at the pair, to perhaps find out why.

Meggie is complex and I wanted to do justice to her character in the writing of Meggie’s Remains.  I wanted to show how she must walk that fine line between day dreams and nightmares, between what is real and what is not—forced to run for her life when the fiend so long stalking in her nightmares, surfaces in the light of day.   Meggie is a pretty young woman, twenty-five when the story opens, slender, five foot two, with a full, rosy mouth, violet eyes that can turn passionately dark, a peaches and cream complexion, and long rusty-red hair.  But she’s forced to hide her good looks, not wanting to gain any man’s attention after the painful, sinful episode in her past.  No one must find out, no one!  Tainted by her past, she’s deathly afraid of men, so much so pulls her hair up to the point of pain, wears baggy dresses, her only adornment a nun’s cross, hides behind spectacles, and steps away when any man comes near.   In times of upset, Meggie turns to her most trusted companion and friend, Jane Eyre, treasuring the worn pages of her favorite novel above all else in her pitiable life.   Escaping into its pages, Meggie can become Jane, falling in love with Edward Rochester over and over again, imagining that moment of passion when Jane and Edward first meet, when they first touch, imagining such a moment for herself . . . such sweetness . . . such desire . . . such impossible bliss—  Quickly checking herself, Meggie throws off such wild imaginings and does her best to deny her buried desire for love and happiness, knowing she’s not destined to live any kind of a normal life.  She doesn’t desire any man.  When the handsome, formidable westerner, Ethan Rourke, stumbles upon Meggie on a snowy Denver street, it’s as if he’d stepped right off the pages of Jane Eyre! Safe to encounter such a man on the page, it is certainly unsafe, even deadly, for her to encounter such a man in the flesh.  Men belong . . . six feet under, six feet away . . . where to stay safe, the devil must stay!

Ethan is handsome all right—tall, dark, and handsome—standing six foot four, well-built, with dark hair cropped at the shoulders, and intelligent, slate eyes that can seduce with one look.  Though perhaps better looking than Edward Rochester, Ethan is the classic brooding hero, wealthy, with society at his feet, yet given to dark introspection, silent on the things that matter most, keeping his true feelings buried deep.  Haunted by his past, Ethan isn’t interested in committing to another woman, and finds satisfaction enough in the arms of his mistress of five years.  Save for his mistress, he keeps women at a distance.  In his lifetime he’s already seen enough rejection, death, and dying—enough to kill any Faith he once had—and won’t let any woman close.  The moment he stumbles over the odd baggage fallen at his feet on the snowy Denver street, he’s struck through by the curious female; no woman ever looked at him like that before.  He wants to turn away . . . but can he?

Joanne Sundell’s first sale was in 2005, to Five Star, Gale, Cengage Learning.  The prime market for Five Star Expressions is the library market, but Five Star’s books are also available on-line at Barnes & Noble and all bookstores.  The Five Star Expressions line is a combination of romance and women’s fiction.  Joanne’s particular interest is in historical romance with suspenseful elements.

To date, Joanne’s sales to Five Star include:  MATCHMAKER, MATCHMAKER (06), A…MY NAME’S AMELIA (07) also out in Large Print, THE PARLOR HOUSE DAUGHTER (08) also out in Large Print, MEGGIE’S REMAINS (09), & THE QUAKER AND THE CONFEDERATE upcoming series (5/10, 9/10).   Joanne’s first sale was reviewed nationally by Booklist, her second by Library Journal and Publisher’s Weekly, and her third by Publisher’s Weekly and Booklist.  A…MY NAME’S AMELIA garnered a top 4&1/2 star rating from Romantic Times Magazine.

History is always a strong character in Joanne’s books, with her first four stories set in colorful, turbulent Colorado history and her next, a two-book series set in Civil War Virginia.  As important as it is for Joanne to convey a strong, credible, historical flavor of the time, it is equally important for Joanne to portray strong, credible heroines and heroes.   A strong, determined heroine deserves an equally strong and determined hero.   Joanne grew up reading romance, historical and contemporary, falling in love with heroes and heroines from Regency England to the American West, from London’s pubs to Colorado’s ski slopes, loving that moment when the hero and heroine meet and fall in love.  That moment to Joanne is the moment when Jane Eyre meets Edward Rochester, when Elizabeth Bennett meets Mr. Darcy … that’s the heart-stopping, passionate moment for Joanne in romance.  That moment is what led her to attempt traditional, old-fashioned historical romance.

With her three, Colorado-mountain-raised-children grown and off on their own adventures, Joanne lives part-time in Colorado and California, with her husband and their entourage` of felines and huskies.

Joanne is a member of Colorado Romance Writers, Romance Writers of America, Women Writing the West, Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers, and Los Angeles Romance Authors.

e-mail Joanne:  author@joannesundell.com

www.joannesundell.com

www.joannesundell/blogspot.com

www.myspace.com/joannesundell

Editor’s Note: Pick up your copy at Amazon here!

DISTANT THUNDER by Christian Fiction Author and Pastor Jimmy Root Jr.

Inspiration is an interesting word with Biblical roots. It literally means that something is breathed out by God. I would not put the fictional story of Distant Thunder in that category, but its foundation of Biblical prophecy certainly qualifies. Being a life-long student of Bible Prophecy, I found it a natural transition from teaching those prophecies to creating a story with prophecy as its basis.

One of the stunning aspects of ancient Old Testament scripture is how what was predicted over twenty-five hundred years ago has, and is coming true today. Ezekiel the prophet witnessed a vision that described the re-birth of the nation of Israel. He also related how a coalition of nations, soon after that re-birth, would gather to destroy the Jewish nation. I use the word stunning because Ezekiel listed the exact nations that are headlining today’s news as being mortal enemies of Israel. Is that a coincidence? I think not and therein the idea to write a fictional story based on current events was born.

Now, in the creation of Distant Thunder and The Lightning Chronicles, inspiration comes into play. I took two passions from my personal life, Bible prophecy and the military thriller genre, and blended them into what I am calling a prophetic fiction thriller. Using what is most familiar to my own purpose I began by creating a character based on the life of a Pastor. As with my wife, many have asked if Pastor Ty Dempsey, one of the two main characters in the book, happened to be my alter ego. The answer is a resounding no. Aspects of my daily life show up simply because that is what is familiar to me. But Ty is his own man. He is an ordinary individual that is confronted with an extraordinary and frightening circumstance. He portrays how heroism is alive and well, even though that heroism might go unnoticed.

The real work came with the second main character, something that was totally apart from my personal experience. Moshe Eldan is an Israeli F-16 fighter pilot. Although the thought of flying something so powerful and dangerous as a fighter jet has always been a dream, I have never been within a hundred yards of an F-16. So, I began with a series of questions that led me deep into the research of my character’s surroundings. That included studying the advanced military weaponry and tactics used by the Israelis and other national air forces. It meant buying an F-16 flight simulator and spending hours trying to figure out how the thing worked. I confess I had a blast, plus, the aerial dogfight sequences in which fighter jets are shot from the sky became quite realistic. Thankfully, the military aspects of Distant Thunder passed muster as a 9th Air Force Combat Instructor reviewed the material and called it “spot on.” From that point, the rest of the story was easy and just exciting in the writing as it will be for the reader.

I have read of authors spending weeks outlining a storyline in order to make their book come alive. But for me, the story seemed to flow from the very start. I found myself surprised and perplexed at the actions of my characters, and that is how it should be. They were as unpredictable and conflict-driven as any normal human being. That, to me, is the greatest inspiration of all.

Jimmy Root Jr., has served as an ordained minister with the Assemblies of God since 1982, including service in Nebraska, Missouri, and a seven year term as a missionary in Colombia, South America. Jimmy is the lead Pastor of Family Worship Center of Smithville, a growing suburb of Kansas City, Missouri. Married to his wife Jean for twenty-nine years, the Roots have three grown children.

Root is a 1981 alumnus of Central Bible College of Springfield, Missouri where he majored in Biblical Studies and Pastoral Theology. He is also an alumnus of Southeastern University, Lakeland Florida, where he majored in Intercultural Studies.

A lifetime student of Biblical prophecy, Jimmy is also the Professor of Eschatology, The Study of End Times, for Berean University through the Northern Missouri District School of Ministry. He is a featured speaker at Churches and other venues, and is the host of “The Bible Uncensored” radio broadcast heard on radio stations around the country.

His writings, both in book form as well as his blog, are purposed to be a wake-up call to a sleepy American church that seems to be losing a truly Christian World View. Distant Thunder and its sequels, A Gathering Storm and Then Comes Lightning, will reveal to the adventure/thriller aficionado the reality of the coming fulfillment of Biblically prophesied events. You can visit his website at www.lightningchronicles.com or his blog at www.prophecyalert.blogspot.com. Connect with him on twitter at www.twitter.com/JimmyRootJr and Facebook at www.facebook.com/jimmyrootjr.

TOUGH LOVE, TENDER HEART by Steven Verrier: “…a chance to escape in a good story well-told.”

Our guest blogger today is Steven Verrier, author of the novel, Tough Love, Tender Heart.

You can visit his website at http://www.stevenverrier.com/.

I’m a partner in an international marriage, though I’ll admit my spouse and I never faced many of the problems Don and Ana do in Tough Love, Tender Heart. But I’ve talked to innocent people who’ve been mistreated, or at least misread, by the immigration bureaucracy here in the United States and abroad. There’s a certain arbitrary nature to immigration matters that I think ought to be addressed, and that’s one of the reasons I set out to write this book.

Having immigrated to Canada as a child, I’ve long been interested in matters concerning immigration. Living over the years in cities such as Toronto, Vancouver, and New York and seeing firsthand how large-scale immigration can affect a community only enhanced my interest in the growing pains of immigration. Living in Texas now—San Antonio, to be precise—I see daily how long-time residents and recent immigrants sometimes struggle to build and maintain a sense of community.

No doubt 9/11 soured a lot of Americans on the advisability of opening America’s gates too widely. I’ve talked to immigrants to the US who’ve been hesitant to travel outside the United States since 9/11 for fear of being harassed upon their return by American immigration officials. There’s a perception among some that immigration officials at US airports and border posts don’t always apply the law fairly or evenly when it comes to foreign nationals trying to enter the United States. I can say from experience that some such officials don’t even know the law. To cite a personal example, I recall trying to explain to one know-it-all official on the American side of a US-Canada border crossing that I wasn’t violating any laws by holding both Canadian and American nationalities. And, believe me, I could cite other personal examples where immigration officials, standing on shaky legal ground, acted as if they knew it all and had better not be challenged.

Of course, I set out to write an entertaining novel as well, one that lives up to its back-cover billing, which says: “Tough Love, Tender Heart is a stirring, fast-flowing depiction of love trying to take root in an impossible situation, and a tale of unsurpassed relevance to our cross-cultural and post-9/11 age.” In other words, the primary inspiration when it came to writing this book was a desire to provide readers two things: a chance to escape in a good story well-told, and some food for thought.

TOUGH LOVE, TENDER HEART is available at amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, and other sources. For more information about TOUGH LOVE, TENDER HEART or about Steven Verrier, visit stevenverrier.com, and drop the author a line telling him what you think about this book!

HEART OF DIAMONDS by Dave Donelson: “…the terrible plight of the people of the Democratic Republic of Congo.”

Heart of Diamonds is a high-concept romantic thriller about blood diamonds in the Congo. The plot involves the White House, the President of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and an American televangelist in a diamond smuggling scheme that is uncovered by a TV reporter, Valerie Grey.

The idea came from research I did that was prompted by Michael Fay’s fascinating 15-month, 2,000-kilometer megatransect of the Congo basin for National Geographic. What a great achievement that was! I’ve done some pretty hairy trips myself, but nothing like that. I became fascinated with the Congo and delved into the politics and history of the country.

The concept for Heart of Diamonds sprang from an item I came across in Time Magazine about the cozy relationship between Pat Robertson, the famous American televangelist, and Mobutu Sese-Seko, the dictator who raped the Congo for thirty years. When I found out Robertson owned diamond mines and timber concessions in the Congo—making profits from slave labor, no less—I simply had to write a book about it.

The Robertson-Mobutu connection makes for quite a story. Mobutu was essentially put in office by the CIA. He ran the country—which he renamed Zaire—with an iron fist and stole literally billions of dollars. He also had one of the worst human rights records in Africa, which is saying a lot.

Pat Robertson, on the other hand, is one of the most successful evangelical preachers of all time. He founded the 700 Club, ran for President of the United States, and has millions of followers who subscribe to his version of Christianity. You wouldn’t think these two men would be buddies, would you?

But they were. Robertson was deeply involved in business dealings in the Congo. The Time article reported that once, in the late 1980’s, Robertson and his wife and their entourage were flown from Paris to Kinshasa on one of Mobutu’s personal Boeing 707s. In Zaire, Mobutu personally took them on the presidential yacht on a ride up the Congo River to visit one of his estates.

Robertson had a relief program in the Congo–Operation Blessing, which is still operating today—as well as a private concern called the African Development Company, which made investments in mining, lumber, agriculture, transportation and power generation, supposedly with an eye to plowing the profits back into humanitarian efforts. One of those investments was a diamond mine in a small town south of Tshikapa near the Congo’s border with Angola. That’s where I placed the diamond mine in Heart of Diamonds.

One of the men who ran ADC for Robertson was Bill Lovick, a former minister who was dismissed by the Assemblies of God church in 1985 for questionable fund raising practices. Readers of Heart of Diamonds may find some interesting similarities between these men and some of the characters in the novel, notably televangelist Gary Peterson, the missionary Thomas Alben who runs the diamond mine, and Moise Messime, the President of the Congo.

As I read more and more about these guys and the things they were doing in the Congo in the name of Jesus Christ, the more intrigued I became. Heart of Diamonds obviously isn’t their story—the smuggling scheme, the connection to the White House, the U.S. military involvement, and so on are completely fictional. My heroine Valerie Grey and the other characters are figments of my imagination, too, although they certainly have personality traits similar to real individuals.

What is not fiction in Heart of Diamonds is the terrible plight of the people of the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is the direct result of the unadulterated greed exhibited by people eager to control the vast natural resources of the country. Mobutu may be long gone and Pat Robertson’s business interests gone with him, but the brutality continues.

Dave Donelson is the author of the romantic thriller HEART OF DIAMONDS. You can visit his website at www.davedonelson.com or www.heartofdiamonds.com.

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